The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence Covers the September Issue

Whether lighting up an indie or fronting a blockbuster franchise, Jennifer Lawrence is the most electric talent to hit Hollywood in a generation. Jonathan Van Meter meets America’s favorite heroine.

Leave it to J.Law to choose the Odeon, a restaurant she plucked from a list because she liked the sound of its name. It opened on a corner in Tribeca long before Lawrence was even born and defined a genre: Execute everything perfectly, but don’t take it all so seriously—an apt description of Lawrence herself. Indeed, Odeon has lasted for 30 years because, while it cares about great service and good food, it is committed above all else to being fun. In fact, I myself had so much early-nineties fun there that when I walked in at 1:00 p.m. on a Friday and sat down, I had a reaction that can only be described as Pavlovian: I ordered a vodka.

Jennifer Lawrence—unlike, say, Jennifer Aniston or Jennifer Lopez or Jennifer Garner—never looks the same. It’s one of the reasons writers struggle to find words to describe her, and often resort to unfortunate ones, like chameleon. David O. Russell, the man who directed Lawrence to an Oscar in Silver Linings Playbook, remembers bumping into her during awards season, 2011. “I would see this tall blonde at events, and I never understood who she was,” he says. “She looked like an Orange County girl—or Malibu Barbie. And I was like, ‘Who is that?’ And someone would say, ‘That’s Jennifer Lawrence,’ and I would say, ‘The girl cooking a squirrel on a stick in Winter’s Bone?’ I never recognized her! She always looks different.”

So different, in fact, that even after one of her two bodyguards comes into the restaurant to tell me that her arrival is imminent, when she finally walks in the door, I still don’t recognize her. To be fair, she has on pitch-black Tom Ford sunglasses, and her hair is wet; she recently had it cut off into a Karlie chop, one that is half blonde and half brown. (“Too skunky?” she will ask me later. “I think I need to make a decision.”). But before she even reaches the table, I can hear that raspy voice—the deep rumble of so much nervous energy. Yup, that’s her.

Lawrence, who is wearing a blush-colored sleeveless top (purchased an hour ago at Topshop), slouchy black pants, and a pair of slip-on mules, immediately notices that I have a cast on my foot and a cocktail in front of me. After sheepishly explaining how I broke it (fiftieth-birthday party, dance floor, 3:00 a.m.), she fixes her blue-gray eyes on me with a face that is adorably sympathetic, sure, but is also contorted from trying to hold back a laugh. My foot is the reason all of the outdoorsy stuff we were going to do together—horseback riding, walking around Central Park—got nixed. My suggestion of going to an arcade in the West Village to shoot pool or play video games was rejected because, Lawrence says, “That’s my exact demographic.” So here we are. “Should we just get drunk?” she asks as the waiter sets a beer down in front of her. Perhaps it’s the specter of Odeon’s past—a place made famous by Jay McInerney’s novel of eighties excess, Bright Lights, Big City (which she has never heard of)—that launches us into a seven-hour bender. In any case, you could do worse as the setting for such decadence.

You can learn a lot about a person in seven hours. Little things, like the kinds of food they don’t like—arugula, eggplant, goat cheese (“I have the taste buds of a five-year-old”), which TV show they’re obsessed with (Homeland), the strange stuff they’re afraid of (“I don’t have nightmares about clowns or burglars or murderers. I have nightmares about thirteen-year-olds. They terrify me”). But you can also learn things that are superspecific. For example, she got the nickname J.Law in seventh grade, but it was only this spring that she met J.Lo while hanging out at a party one night with Jimmy Fallon. “We planned out this whole thing, where we were going to spin around and over to her and go, ‘Please dance with us!’ But at the last minute, Jimmy pooped out, and all of a sudden I spun around by myself and said, ‘Dance with . . . me?’ And she was like, ‘Thanks, I’m just gonna watch.’ ”

Jennifer Lawrence Talks The Hunger Games

And therein lies the biggest surprise about Jennifer Lawrence: She has the soul of a comedian and can riff on just about anything that crosses her path. She did a 20-minute monologue about sponges: “I wake up earlier in the morning when I have new sponges. That counter doesn’t even see it coming.” She segued into her incomprension at people who don’t share her “faith in sponges” and then finally landed on her relationship with ex-boyfriend Nicholas Hoult, with whom she’s still very close (they’re shooting X-Men: Days of Future Past together). “He would never wring them out. We were in the kitchen once, and I picked up the sponge, and it was soapy and wet, and I was like, ‘See?’ These are the kinds of things that make me think we are never going to work.”

The folks who know her best (which is to say, other actors and directors, as she has lived from one film set to the next for most of her adult life) all point to this playful side of Lawrence—this “giant goofball,” as one person put it—as the most important thing about her. Her Hunger Games costar Woody Harrelson says she creates an atmosphere on set of constant game-playing. “She is one-of-a-kind, man. She is so herself. I love how she doesn’t censor herself. She says the most outrageous shit. Just incredible, the stuff she’ll say.”

As Russell says, “She grew up with these two older brothers, so she will do an off-color joke that will shock you and make you laugh so hard. And then she just moves on.” Jodie Foster, who directed her in The Beaver a few years ago, agrees: “It’s one of the things that I love about her the most—her rapid-fire teenage-boy-humor brain.”

Moments after Lawrence first walks into the restaurant and sits down, she takes off her shoes to show me her toes. They are blue. She has been in Montreal all summer, shooting the fifth installment of X-Men, in which she plays the supervillain Mystique, a hot chick with blue skin and yellow eyes who shape-shifts into normal people in order to assassinate those involved in anti-mutant activity (hence, the video-arcade demographic). “They paint me blue every day,” she says, “so this is what I’m dealing with.” She sticks out her foot again and laughs. “I’m like Blue Swan.”

As if one big studio franchise weren’t enough, in the last year, Lawrence spent several months in Atlanta and Hawaii shooting the second Hunger Games film, Catching Fire, due out in November, after which she went directly to the set of American Hustle, the next David O. Russell film (slated for December), inspired by the late-seventies FBI sting operation known as Abscam, a near-farcical bribery scandal that brought down one U.S. senator and six congressmen. Russell’s new ensemble piece reunites Lawrence with her Silver Linings castmates Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, and the actress, as a favor to Russell, sandwiched this film between shooting two of the biggest blockbuster series running, which gives you some sense of just how charmed—and peripatetic—Lawrence’s life has become.

The flip side is that more than one person I spoke with about Lawrence worried aloud that she’s working too hard. “Just for her sanity, I personally wish she would slow down a little bit,” says Francis Lawrence (no relation), who directed Catching Fire and in October will begin shooting the final two Hunger Games films in Atlanta, back-to-back. “I think that going from one set to the next to the next will eventually take a toll. I hope at some point she gets some time off.”

Lawrence was supposed to take a break between Catching Fire and X-Men, but during the Oscar-victory lap for Silver Linings, Russell asked her to play Christian Bale’s wife in American Hustle—and then wrote the part of Rosalyn expressly for her. “Rosalyn is 100 percent a product of David’s imagination,” she says. “She’s a manic-depressive alcoholic, and I couldn’t wait. Plus, I got to make out with Christian Bale.”

Russell can barely contain his glee at how completely his new muse embraced her first truly adult part—up to and including the oversize fur, the smoky-purple sunglasses, and the frosted updo. “It’s a character who is kind of an unhinged, intense, manipulative, brilliant, but also soulful and heartbreaking Long Island housewife. And that was exciting to her. She has a genuine, in-her-blood joy in the inhabitation of other people.”

More than any other young actress in recent memory, Lawrence also seems to have an almost compulsive need to take full advantage of every opportunity that comes her way. “I couldn’t say no,” she says. “And then when I was on set, I was like, ‘This is so much more important than a vacation. It’s so much better for my brain to be creatively stimulated in this way.’ It reminded me: This is what I love.”

One of the oddities of Jennifer Lawrence’s life right now is that the character that she is most closely associated with— Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games—is on a trajectory that is, in many ways, similar to Lawrence’s own. “When Winter’s Bone was getting nominated,” says Lawrence, “I had only done indies, and suddenly I was introduced to this brand-new world where I didn’t feel like myself. I was in these weird gowns and listening to people talk about things I didn’t understand. And I remember reading that in the book and being like, Oh, my God, I know exactly what this feels like. I don’t know what it’s like to get ready for your death, but I do know what it’s like to be almost a puppet. And then when I was making the second film, I had become more acquainted with that world, and I think that’s something that Katniss experiences. She is different when she comes back. She does feel more comfortable in the Capitol; she understands the people more, and it’s not as eerie and scary and unfamiliar. She kind of knows how to work the system.”

Francis Lawrence, who replaced the first Hunger Games director, Gary Ross, for reasons mostly to do with scheduling, is a director known for his stylish music videos for Lady Gaga, Pink, and Missy Elliott, as well as the Will Smith film I Am Legend. Because the second installment explores the outrageous visual extravaganza that is the Capitol in more depth, one of the biggest changes the director made was to bring in costume designer Trish Summerville, whom he had worked with on music videos and who designed the costumes for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. “I thought there were amazing opportunities for some great fashion moments in the film,” he says. Summerville’s big coup was getting Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen to lend several archive and runway pieces, mostly worn by the mistress of ceremonies, Effie Trinket, gamely played by Elizabeth Banks, looking like Gaga’s crazy auntie. “In the first film,” says Summerville, “it looked like everyone shopped at the same store. I wanted to show variety. The elite, but from all walks of life. So I did fashion trends: Molded felt hats are all the rage! Plaids are in! That kind of thing.”

Behind the Scenes with Jennifer Lawrence on Her September Cover Shoot

It’s interesting that Summerville has dressed both Katniss Everdeen and Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander. Both are complicated characters—badass can-do chicks who are possessed of a weird inner strength that they themselves do not entirely understand. And they both represent a new kind of Hollywood heroine. “Women have never really been painted that way, as the young male hero,” says Jodie Foster. “It’s a long tradition—the structure of it is thousands of years old—and I think when we see women as these characters we see a real person, a real heroic path.”

The actresses playing these characters share similar qualities as well. Both Jennifer Lawrence and Rooney Mara are quirky, unconventional, and immensely talented, bright young stars who were Oscar-nominated right out of the gate. And they both also have a quiet seriousness about them. They feel like indie sirens who could have had perfectly satisfying careers making smaller, more idiosyncratic films. And yet, here they are, shouldering these giant franchises.

“I’ve seen them working really hard,” says Summerville, “the long hours, the conditions, how athletic they have to be, the stamina. It takes a lot of talent, and both of them have that. And they’re both really sharp, really intelligent, really quick.” That quickness translates to the screen: They each have a changeling aspect that’s almost Streepian. As Summerville says, “I don’t think there’s a role they can’t play—they can be period, they can be contemporary, they can be futuristic. These are timeless faces. You can’t pigeonhole them.”

Maybe two people don’t make a trend, but if we are at the outset of a new, less-conservative era in Hollywood, it will have been a long time coming. “You’re getting out of the kind of CW Network blandness and into these raw and interesting and nuanced performances,” says Francis Lawrence. “But one thing I worry about is overexposure. A lot of the power comes from their anonymity, and I hope that these two young actresses can maintain some of their privacy.”

It’s not going to be easy. David O. Russell saw Lawrence’s fame materialize before his very eyes. “When she first showed up on the set of Silver Linings, she was asking Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro what it’s like to have people come up to you on the street,” he says. “That wasn’t really happening to her. People didn’t really know who she was. But by the time the film was released and we did an event in Santa Barbara, it was like being at a Beatles concert. There were thousands of screaming people. It was mind-blowing.”

I was admittedly thrown at first by the presence of Lawrence’s bodyguards, whom we can see outside the Odeon, leaning up against a big black SUV. I had not fully internalized that the utterly guileless person sitting before me—the same rambunctious, rascally young girl I had been seeing on TV, sassing interviewers and flirting with Jack Nicholson at the Oscars while being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos after having tripped on the voluminous skirt of her Dior dress as she was heading up the stairs to receive her statuette—that that girl is the very same girl who is now stalked by paparazzi everywhere she goes because she is young and beautiful and unpredictable and has been anointed the most exciting, completely realized movie star to come along in decades.

Apparently, she has not fully internalized it either. Whenever the tenuous little bubble of privacy she has created around us—through body language, facing away from the room—gets invaded, she becomes agitated. At one point, a party of four is seated next to us, and an otherwise sophisticated-looking woman at the table spots Lawrence, digs for her phone, and then holds it straight out and starts clicking away, as if documenting her visit to the Louvre. “Can you stop?” Lawrence pleads. With her head down, she grumbles to me under her breath. Yeah, that was pretty aggressive, I say. “Me?” she says, looking mortified. No, her, I say. “I’m just really starting to feel like a monkey in a zoo,” she admits.

Related Articles

Lawrence is well aware that no one likes to hear famous people complain about being famous. (And surely her publicist has told her that it is a losing proposition.) But it is a subject—“a dangerous topic,” she calls it—that we come back to several times because she is obviously having a difficult time adjusting. “I teeter on seeming ungrateful when I talk about this,” she says at one point, “but I’m kind of going through a meltdown about it lately.” Not surprisingly, however, she makes a good case for a newcomer who, let’s face it, probably didn’t see this coming. “All of a sudden the entire world feels entitled to know everything about me, including what I’m doing on my weekends when I’m spending time with my nephew. And I don’t have the right to say, ‘I’m with my family.’ ”

It’s not a secret that the Internet has created a new, more hellish reality for actors, partly because everyone is paparazzi now—e.g., the woman sitting next to us. Before you cue the tiny violins, Lawrence does have a point: “If I were just your average 23-year-old girl,” she says, “and I called the police to say that there were strange men sleeping on my lawn and following me to Starbucks, they would leap into action. But because I am a famous person, well, sorry, ma’am, there’s nothing we can do. It makes no sense.” What really gets to her is when people say, “You have to make peace with it.” “I am just not OK with it,” she says. “It’s as simple as that. I am just a normal girl and a human being, and I haven’t been in this long enough to feel like this is my new normal. I’m not going to find peace with it.”

Listening to Lawrence get fired up about this, I could not help but think: She will find a cause worth fighting for one day, and it will not be celebrity rights and paparazzi. That just happens to be the injustice that she is experiencing now. She will get used to being famous, or things will calm down, but it is more than clear that there is a hellcat feminist firebrand lurking somewhere inside of her. I would not be the least bit surprised to see her marching on Washington one day, hand in hand with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

Russell also thinks that this, too, shall pass. “She loves living and having her freedom. I’m sure she’ll find a way to keep doing that.” Jodie Foster, who knows a thing or two about having your life upended by other people’s obsessions, says this: “It wasn’t the same when I was young. I never hired a bodyguard in my life. But certainly, there’s a way to live your life—your real life, the life you live after 5:00 p.m.—and it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s a temporary thing. She’s grounded and solid, with great parents and all that; they will remind her of who she is. I think she has the God-given genetic ability to be well adjusted.”

When I tell Lawrence that it’s been a while since I’ve profiled an actress, she looks at me. “Oh, no,” she says. “You’re rusty?” I can’t help wondering where the funny comes from. Her parents, Karen and Gary, raised her and her older brothers, Blaine and Ben, in Louisville. Were they funny? “My mom is big funny,” she says. “She’s loud funny. And my dad is the opposite—the funniest person you will ever meet, but he never raises his voice. He’s just really quick. Very subtle.” She pauses. “We definitely grew up funny.” Another pause. “You have to be funny in our family, to survive, because we are so mean to each other.”

Although she jokes about it (“I think all mothers are a nightmare—I don’t think you can have children and not lose your goddamn mind”), she is close to her parents. Her mother owns a summer camp (Blaine runs it now), and her father was in construction. (Ben designs Web sites.) The story of how their daughter was discovered—photographed in Union Square in New York City by a model scout when she was visiting the city on spring break at the age of fourteen—has been written about so much that, even though she’s only 23, it has already ossified into myth. Could it be true? Had someone so obviously gifted never really thought about acting? “Look,” she says. “I grew up in Kentucky, I have brothers, we had to do sports, I was a horrible student, and I kept getting grounded every time my report card came out. Acting was never an option. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, well, you got a C in math; you’re grounded. But you can be an actor!’ ”

All throughout our lunch at Odeon, the part of Lawrence that never let up was a kind of intense engagement with the world or the person in front of her. You could practically see her brain scanning the room, sifting through the data, and then spitting out something dryly observed, perfectly timed, or oddly profound. (At one point she picked up my RadioShack tape recorder and examined it: “This thing is archaic. Are you going to write this whole thing out longhand, with, like, a pen?”) If there is a downside—and I didn’t experience it as such—it might be that she’s so busy connecting and processing that it overwhelms her. There were many moments when she was so excited to share the seven things that just popped into her head that it would render her breathless and momentarily incomprehensible. As Jodie Foster says about directing her, “It’s hard for her to be superficial, to be girly and silly and unaware. And so my direction was often stupid things, like ‘Move your hands a lot’ or ‘Giggle,’ just trying to loosen her up so she wasn’t as aware of her own significance.”

Given her intensity, it does not come as a surprise that Lawrence describes her childhood as an “unhappy” one—exceptional, excitable, hot-wired kids are often misunderstood and full of anxiety. Lawrence herself was so anxious that her parents found her a therapist. “I was a weirdo,” she says. “I wasn’t picked on or anything. And I wasn’t smarter than the other kids; that’s not why I didn’t fit in. I’ve always just had this weird anxiety. I hated recess. I didn’t like field trips. Parties really stressed me out. And,” she adds, “I had a very different sense of humor.” I ask Lawrence how that manifested itself in, say, junior high. She launches into several tales as examples. Like the time she decided it would be funny to jump out of the emergency exit of a moving school bus; or the time she thought it would be really funny to announce to the entire seventh grade that she wet the bed; or this: “My family went on a cruise, and I got a terrible haircut. FYI: Never get your hair cut on a cruise. And I had, like, this blonde curly ‘fro, and I walked into the gym the first day back in seventh grade and everyone was staring at me, and for some reason I thought, I know what I need to do! And I just started sprinting from one end of the gym to the other, and I thought it was hilarious. But nobody else at that age really did. It was genuinely weird.”

David O. Russell mentions a story that Lawrence told him about how when she was ten years old, she would ring her own doorbell and then pretend to be someone else when her family answered: “Hi, my name is Susan. My car broke down up the street, and I’m wondering if I could come in and use your phone.” Given all of this, it’s hard to believe that Lawrence—or her parents—didn’t have some inkling she was destined for show business. “I’ve never said this before,” she says, “because there is no way to say it without it being completely misunderstood, but ever since I was really little, I always had a very normal idea of what I wanted: I was going to be a mom and I was going to be a doctor and I was going to live in Kentucky. But I always knew”—here she lowers her voice—“that I was going to be famous. I honest to God don’t know how else to describe it. I used to lie in bed and wonder, Am I going to be a local TV person? Am I going to a motivational speaker? It wasn’t a vision. But as it’s kind of happening, you have this buried understanding: Of course.”

Lawrence left school when she was fifteen to pursue acting in earnest, and by 2006, she was living in a condo in Santa Monica with her mother. She quickly got cast in the TBS comedy The Bill Engvall Show, which lasted only three seasons. “I know it sounds so stupid,” says Lawrence, “but it was kind of like I finally found something people were telling me I was good at, which I had never heard, ever. And that was a big reason why my parents let me do this. One time, my mom was on the phone with my dad, saying, ‘We’re paying for therapy and all this medication, and we don’t need it when she’s here. She’s happy.’ ”

Lawrence made a series of independent films, including Guillermo Arriaga’s directorial debut, The Burning Plain, with Charlize Theron. And then, just before she turned nineteen, she shot Winter’s Bone, the deeply affecting low-budget film about a family of crystal-meth addicts in the Ozarks, directed by Debra Granik—and got her first Oscar nomination. “She has such a pure talent,” says Foster, who cast her in The Beaver based on a few minutes of footage she saw of Winter’s Bone in the editing room. “She has this really quiet talent that in the beginning I don’t think she even understood she had.”

“Whatever it was that happened to her when she was young, when she figured things out,” says Russell, “she transmuted all that energy into the soul and the freedom that she puts into acting.” During the filming of Catching Fire, Francis Lawrence was “blown away by the seemingly small amount of work that goes into a performance and how instinctive everything is,” he says. “It’s all spontaneous; it all comes out of her gut, in the moment. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Russell was constantly taken aback by her seeming nonchalance. “I remember Bradley Cooper and I saying, ‘Is this kid even paying attention?’ Because she’s goofing around or eating my potato chips or making fart jokes. And then all of a sudden, she comes in, and bam! She’s like a lot of great athletes. You see that they stay loose, and that’s how they can be so in-the-moment while under enormous amounts of pressure. If there’s two minutes left in the game, they can come in and do something extraordinary because their jaw is not getting clenched. Jen stays loose. And then she hits a three-point shot from some ridiculous distance and we all just look at each other and go, ‘Wow.’ ”

After four hours at the Odeon, we gather our things (“Don’t forget your nineties car phone,” she says) and then head outside. We pile into the SUV and immediately get caught in a bumper-to-bumper snarl (“There’s too much traffic,” she says to the driver. “You’re fired”). We are heading back to the Greenwich Hotel (owned by Lawrence’s pal De Niro, whom she bumped into last night), where she is staying for the weekend, in a huge suite on the sixth floor. We stand at the big windows as a summer thunderstorm rolls through and drenches all the hapless people on the street below. “Right now I’m just a big fan of windows,” she says. “I stand at my window at my hotel in Montreal. Like it will be hours. It’s the only time I can look at big groups of people, and they’re not looking at me.”

Suddenly, her assistant and best friend of four years, Justine, walks in. She’s just come back from having lunch with an ex-boyfriend, and they parse the meaning of every exchange. Then Lawrence gives her friend the once-over and says, “P.S. Perfect outfit. And your butt looks great in that skirt.” They met four years ago, shortly after the Winter’s Bone shoot, in Los Angeles, and it was love at first sight. Back at Odeon, when I was asking Lawrence how she stays sane while working so much, she said, “Justine is with me. So it’s kind of like, this consistent thing in my life. I’m still doing what a 23-year-old should be doing, which is hanging out with my friend and being normal. I still have to put the dishes away. And I still have to listen. When you’ve been doing press for a very long time, you talk about yourself constantly. My biggest fear is that I’m going to take that into the real world.”

Justine says, “What did you guys talk about for four hours?” I mention that one of the things we discussed is how odd it is that the press makes such a big deal over how “refreshingly unfiltered” her friend is, just because she has opinions and is funny.

“I just think when you’re famous, everything is exaggerated,” Justine says. “It’s because she’s honest. It sounds a little cheesy, but she has a real person’s body, she cusses and says the wrong things on television, and she’s just herself. Literally everyone else is playing the game, but she is not. And I don’t think she’s capable of playing it, frankly.” She goes on, “The number-one question I’m asked is ‘Has she changed?’ And I get such pleasure in being able to say, ‘No. If anything, she’s gotten more grounded, more normal.’ ”

It’s perhaps no accident that the actor Lawrence gets most “starstruck” by is her X-Men costar James McAvoy, “because he knows what’s important: He has a wife, he has a baby, and he has a calm peacefulness about him that comes from just knowing that this is what life is about.” Lawrence appears determined to keep a sense of herself, too, despite the craziness of Hollywood, where people regularly tell her she should date somebody “on her level.” “Like, what is that level?” she asks. “That doesn’t mean anything to me, as a person.”

Lawrence seems very aware that she’s a girl from Kentucky with uncanny talent who happens to be riding a huge wave. At one point back at Odeon, I asked her if she was enjoying Montreal. “A little bit. I mean . . . uh . . . yeah? Yes and no. It’s just that I’m still getting used to everything. It still makes me a little emotional, just to see how quickly everything kind of changes . . . that it changes so fast. So I’ve kind of been a big homebody lately. But I think eventually, one of these days, I guess when the next franchise starts and I’m not in it, and the new Jennifer Lawrence is born, then I’ll be able to go outside.”

In the meantime, she has no plans to slow down anytime soon. One of the projects she’s most excited about, she says, is producing the film version of Jeannette Walls’s blockbuster memoir The Glass Castle. When I mention that I’ve always thought of Walls as an old-fashioned forties throwback, with her coiffed red hair and big, toothy smile, she says, “Yes, those are the things I’m trying to take out of the movie.” I ask her to explain, and it turns out that Lawrence is going to bring some of her own true-grit authenticity to the part. “Jeannette wanted to fit in a polished world, so she’d shower all the time because she never felt clean,” Lawrence says. “I find that, to watch somebody for two hours, you want her to have a little dirt on her, to be a little tacky, you know? I feel like you like those people more.”

Jodie Foster, the original lovable kid with the dirt under her fingernails who moved effortlessly between seventies art-house cinema and studio blockbusters—not to mention practically wrote the book on how to be both dangerously famous and stubbornly private—understands those kinds of dichotomies: “Like me, she’s not afraid of her serious side. But she’s also fun and full of life, and in a way, that’s the part that’s going to save her. That she has both sides. She can see the tragic and the comic side of her life.”